Pedants will be in uproar after it was confirmed that the Oxford English
Dictionary had included the erroneous use of the word “literally”.

Fiona McPherson, senior editor, said the new sense was added to the dictionary in September 2011, but seemed to have gone unnoticed. With her tongue firmly in her cheek, she said: “It seems to have literally slipped under the radar.”

The dictionary states that literally means “in a literal way or sense”. But it now adds that, informally, the word can be “used for emphasis rather than being actually true” such as “we were literally killing ourselves laughing”.

The addition may come as a relief to pundits and politicians who have been ridiculed for using the word incorrectly.

Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, last year described low-rate taxpayers as “literally living in a different galaxy”, while Sir Ian Botham, the cricketer, in 2007 said batsmen surviving appeals for leg-before-wicket dismissals had been “getting away with murder, literally”.

Jamie Redknapp, the Sky TV pundit, once said of the Manchester United footballer Wayne Rooney that he was “literally on fire”.

But Ms McPherson said they were in good company. Mark Twain used the more modern sense of the word in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In 1876 he wrote: “And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth.”

The oldest documented incorrect use of the word is 1769 when the author Frances Brooke wrote, in The History of Emily Montague: “He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.”

Ms McPherson said: “Our job is to describe the language people are using. The only reason this sense is included is because people are using it in this way. Words have changed their meaning ever since the first word was uttered. Meat used to mean all food but now its sense has narrowed."